


Afterimages

by Nemonus



Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, Gen, Non-Graphic Violence, Post-Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-05
Updated: 2014-08-05
Packaged: 2018-02-11 19:48:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,487
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2080908
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nemonus/pseuds/Nemonus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A CT who survived the shipyard discovers that Wash has become the leader of the Recovery team.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Afterimages

There were two Recovery agents flanking the rogue Freelancer, but Ohio had a gun to the Engineer's head, and Wash's job was to get to the alien first.

"Stay at the perimeter," Wash said, and heard assenting clicks from across the ice field. Ohio had heard them by now too. Wash could see him, standing out in the center of an almost flat glacier far enough away from the Mother of Invention that neither of them could see the ship. Ohio would be snowblind if not for his armor, and maybe the Engineer was; Ohio had it around the belly, its legs and neck dangling.

"Come any closer and I'll shoot the thing!" Ohio yelled. Through his own scope, Wash could eye the pistol shoved against the Engineer's neck.

"We don't care about the alien!" Wash said, shouting even though he knew Ohio's helmet comm was still open. "Let's get you back here in one piece and you can talk to the Director."

"York and the others left!" Ohio's voice was cracking. "I just wanted to find them."

Wash sighed. Ohio had learned about the break-out soon enough to be interested but not soon enough to actually understand it. His earnest, misguided loyalty weighed Wash down with how much he wanted to agree with it. Not yet, though. Not yet.

"Where did that thing even come from?" one of the Recovery agents asked on their secure channel.

"It must've been on the ship," the second answered her.

"Quiet," Wash said, and they did. Wash cared about the existence of the alien only distantly. Keeping it alive was the priority now, so that he could deliver it and Ohio back to the Director and get on with his own search for the Alpha, for answers, for whatever quirk in his post-Epsilon landscape would allow him to finish the job that CT had started.

He addressed Ohio again. "I'm going to put my gun down. We don't want the alien." The Director had told him this. "I just want to talk."

Ohio hesitated, loosened a little, and Wash could see that he was not just holding a pistol. He had strapped a grenade to the alien too, now lodged in the crook of his arm.

Wash pointed his DMR at the ground and took one step forward. "Why take a hostage at all?" He could play pretend and use the scorched-raw memories in his head as fuel for vengeful patience for now, especially if it saved lives like Ohio's.

"They found something weird. And when I found the alien in the wreck, I knew it was true. Did the Covenant infiltrate us? Was York with them? Am I close?"

"He's in range," Recovery Four said. She was lying on an ice floe with a sniper rifle pointed at Ohio's right shoulder.

"You're close," Wash said quietly, and an unscheduled Longsword roared across the sky.

* * *

"There it is," Katie said. Between the green-glowing control panel of the Longsword's co-pilot's seat and the Insurrectionist's frizz of blonde hair, CT could only see out to the left and right. The wreck of the Mother of Invention covered both sides, sooty black against the cracked snow.

CT had never seen the Mother of Invention crash site before, although knew that the ship had gone down on a scarcely populated planet while she was recovering from her wounds and briefing Charon on what happened at the shipyard. Funny how one minute she had their security boss' blood on her armor and an axe in her right shoulder, and next Charon was setting her up a company e-mail address and the Leader was dead, bled out from the wounds meant for her. CT had time to mourn and get her armor patched up, to do some if not all of the exercises she needed to do to recover completely.

"What are they doing down there?" Katie said as the tiny figures of people spread out across the glacier came into view. CT spotted a sniper at a distance and others trying to pen someone in.

"Whatever it is, that's a lot more surveillance than I expected," she said.

"It's not like you didn't prepare for it, right?" Katie still sometimes sounded needlessly competitive in her tone, but she took to CT's cause with helpful determination.

"The Mother of Invention has one available cannon and limited long-range sensors. It was never even meant to operate in an atmosphere. But now we've scouted. Let's get out," CT said.

Then she saw the yellow stripe on gray armor, and Katie said, "They have a few different comm channels going."

"You can read that?" CT pressed herself into her seat away from the window, suddenly needing something solid to touch, and pulled up another control screen. A few taps more, and she learned. "They changed the main channel, but not some of the others. I can't get in from the ship, but..."

"So who are they?"

 _They're Wash. They're what I thought I left behind. I could still rescue him -_ although it would be like an abduction. "I don't know. It looks like they're fighting among themselves, though."

"Like you said."

"Yeah. Like I left them to."

Just looking down on the top of Wash's helmet pushed guilt and anger into her head that tightened her throat. The same trigger hand he hunched over once stroked her back. She tapped her thumb next to the control panel for the four missiles tucked under the fuselage. It looked like Wash and his team were hunting someone.

"Doesn't look like that ship is getting back on its feet any time soon," Katie said.

They hadn't planned to bomb anything today; the Longsword was simply the fastest way to get into atmosphere and out again. Katie knew that they needed more precision information to keep going after Freelancer anyway. The Oversight Committee had the data, but CT still had sharp eyes.

"I think they see us," CT said, alarmed, and Katie started banking. It wasn't the worst thing in the world to be spotted here - the Longsword had no transponder to speak of - but Church wouldn't want the UNSC snooping around either. She heard Katie growl from the front seat. The Charon Corporation had plenty of reasons to want revenge on the Freelancers, and the Leader's death was just the most recent, most raw one.

* * *

The Recovery channel filled with cursing.

"You tricked me," Ohio said sadly, raising the hand holding both grenade and alien, and by the second word Wash had already turned to run. The shock wave hit him before the shrapnel. He fell on his knees in the snow, thinking that this was where he would use his E.M.P. if he had clearance, when pieces clattered against his armor. His helmet flagged the alien immediately, and he pushed back to his feet, coughing. The Engineer was a greenish lump a few meters away, splattered with orange blood.

* * *

CT and Katie looped back around in time to see Wash mercy kill the Huragok.

"We could have used that," Katie said and CT mourns the loss of the data - data which had been closer to Alpha than anything they've ever had before - much faster than she pities the alien, whatever its nature and involvement, for having died in someone else's war. Later, she will consider this a personal failing.

She found out later when she reviewed the transmissions that Wash was a leader of an organized Recovery team, that he had a new code name on top of code names but was still wearing the same armor. She thought of the muzzle flash and the body she saw only as a black blur in his arms. She thought about seeing that death as a sign of Wash's loyalty to the Director, but realized that she was in denial to protect herself, and didn't want to think of him conducting a quiet rebellion without ever including her.

How did loyal Wash still rationalize working for the Director even though Tex got CT's message, CT wondered? Tex might have been the one who took down the ship. Had Wash found some new kind of cruelty? Was he just muzzle flash?

She would find out, whether through digging deeper into the Director's stolen data or through observing something new. It was inevitable, now that she knew he was part of the advance team.

Katie found her looking at a blueprint of an alien structure in a desert and asked whether she was all right. CT took the question as the monumental effort that it was, seeing that Katie had less than no reason to care about CT's attachment to her former, criminal team.

"It's nothing," she lied.

CT's lies were always two-fold; the words and then the plans she would build off of them. She didn't have to start mourning this new Wash yet. Not when both of them were still alive.


End file.
